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Monday, 27 May 2013

We all know how difficult it can be to understand somebody
who is speaking in a different accent to our own.This is hard enough as an adult at times, but
imagine what it must be like for a child who is just in the process of learning
language and pronunciation.Rachel
Schmale, Alejandrina
Cristia and Amanda
Seidl set out to investigate whether unfamiliar accents completely impede
young children’s word recognition.They
were working on the premise that being exposed to an unfamiliar accent, even
for as short a time as a minute, makes it easier to understand.The idea behind this is that the listener
picks up on patterns in the accent and then ‘maps’ them onto what they
hear.One previous test showed toddlers
a picture of a dog whilst they heard ⁄dæg/ (dag) rather than the expected pronunciation
and, similarly, a picture of a ball whilst they heard ⁄bæl ⁄ (bal). The
toddlers were then found to ‘generalise’ this sound change when it came to
other objects; so, for example, they looked at a sock when hearing /sæk/ (sak)
but, interestingly, not when hearing /sɪk/
(sik) – showing that they had learnt that specific pattern.

However, Schmale, Cristis and Seidl were aware that, in real
life, children are not going to encounter a speaker with a different accent
which only has one specific feature that is unfamiliar; they are much more
likely to hear a foreign accent with many different features from their
own.The researchers wanted to face
toddlers with exposure to a natural accent in the context of fluent speech and
to do this they tested monolingual 2 year olds’ ability to recognise a newly
learned word when it was spoken in a foreign accent.Firstly some of the children listened to a
passage of text, either in their own American English accent or in a Spanish accent.
After that they were tested with names
of objects in the foreign Spanish accent to see if they could identify
them.The researchers tested this by
tracking which objects the children’s eyes looked towards when they heard it
being referred to*. It was found that the children who had been briefly exposed
to the foreign accent beforehand were much more successful in this word
learning task whereas the children who had not been exposed to the foreign
accent were unable to do it.This suggests
that even a few minutes of exposure to a different accent is sufficient to
‘tune’ our ears and help us understand it.

The researchers propose that we adopt two strategies when
faced with an unfamiliar accent.Firstly, we will shift our sound boundaries to accommodate to another’s
accent – just as the children did in the example of dog and dag above.We will try to take a pattern and impose it
onto other words to help us to understand them.However, unfortunately, language is more complicated than this!So, secondly, they propose that when listeners
are faced with an accent that seems to differ dramatically from their own, the
linguistic brain will relax its rules about pronunciation and accept a certain
degree of deviation from its norms.They admit that this could lead to
misunderstandings as listeners will not only accept dag for ‘dog’ but may also start
to accept things like beg for ‘peg’ and sit for ‘seat’, leading to lots of
confusion!They also propose the idea
that a speaker’s ability to adapt to a new unfamiliar accent may literally
improve with age – as we get older our vocabulary expands and, therefore, we
have more resources to draw on when faced with a new accent.What is certain is that this is a fascinating
area that needs further investigation.

Monday, 20 May 2013

At times, the wealth of terms we have at our disposal to
refer to someone can become confusing.For example, should we be saying chairman,
chairperson, chairwoman or just chair?Which is correct and which might be
offensive?Most of us would hope that,
over time, language use has become less sexist and one way of investigating
this is through corpus based research.This involves the analysis of large collections of computerised texts,
identifying frequent linguistic patterns.Paul Baker
decided to compare four of these large collections or ‘corpora’ from 1931,
1961, 1991 and 2006 to explore whether male and female pronouns and nouns
showed any signs of bias in language.

Baker found that, since 1961, there has been a decrease in
usage of all male pronouns, especiallyhe, whilst female pronouns, such as she and her, have increased slightly.Interestingly, the pronouns I
and you have also increased in
usage.This may be due to the fact that
written English is becoming more conversational and personalised over time,
which could relate to the decline of third person pronouns in favour of the first
and second person.

Another type of pronoun which Baker considered was that
which attempts to include both males and females, for example him/her, he/she, he or she or s/he.
The results showed that they are rarely used and although there was an increase
in their usage between 1961 and 1991, the total for 2006 is less than half that
of 1991. This suggests that they are becoming unpopular and in time, may even
die out.One reason for this could be
that people find some gender neutral terms like s/he distracting or messy.They seem easier to implement in writing rather than speech, which could
prove to be a barrier to their long-term uptake.

When Baker concentrated on the nouns man, men, woman and women,
he found that the four words were actually converging and being used as
frequently as each other.However, this wasn’t
true when they were considered as affixes (i.e. as part of another word).For example, the word spokesman still appears to be the most frequently used term,
despite other equivalents like spokeswoman
and spokesperson existing and the
latter being used slightly more frequently in 2006 than ever before.On analysing his data further, Baker found
that spokesman is rarely, if ever,
used to refer to a woman and he surmises that perhaps its frequency over other
forms reveals the social reality that this is a role that men tend to carry out
more than women.

Interestingly, when he analysed the frequencies of the
similar type of word chairman / chairperson
/ chairwoman / chairlady or just chair,
he found that, although chairman has
always been and remains the most popular choice, there was an increase in the
gender-neutral chair in the 2006 data,
giving rise to the hope that it may start to replace chairman. Compared to spokesperson, its popularity could lie
in the fact that it is such a neutral term. Spokes
already exists as a completely unrelated plural noun and any word ending in –person can face resistance as it sounds
so ‘politically correct’, which users often find off-putting.

Finally, Baker considered the titles Mrs, Miss, Ms and Mr,
which have long been of interest to linguists in English-speaking countries due
to their inbuilt inequality as labels.Males are not forced to reveal their marital status with Mr, whereas females have to when they
choose between Mrs or Miss.Ms was conceived in the mid-twentieth
century as an equivalent to Mr.Nevertheless, apart from the confusion
surrounding how it is pronounced, it is often connected with being divorced or
a lesbian, thereby losing its neutrality.Baker found that Ms was still
very rarely used as a title but, perhaps more interestingly, that all the
titles for both genders had decreased over time, so much so that he concludes
that if the trend continues, all gender marked titles in English could become
very rare in thirty years’ time.In
addition to people becoming more aware of gender inequality in language and the
fact that fewer people are married now than in 1931, Baker explains a possible
reason for this as being the increasing personalisation of British culture.Therefore, rather than Mr Smith we may use William
Smith or even Bill Smith instead,
a much more personal and emotionally involved address.

Baker concludes, reassuringly, that people are becoming more
easily persuaded to stop using a sexist or biased term such as Miss.He found that if a new term needed to be used then one that sounds more
natural and is based on an existing word, such as chair, is more likely to be successful.However, the invention of a completely new
term, such as Ms or -person, is likely to be met with
suspicion and resistance.

So in answer to the question of the title, it seems that
maybe we’re beginning to NOT use any of the terms.Such reassuring news is also supported by the
fact that the terms feminism and feminist, which occurred just 3 times in
the 1931 corpus, were found 59 times in 2006.Good on her/it/them/us!

----------------------------------------------------

Baker,
Paul (2010) Will Ms ever
be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based
comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English.
Gender and Language 4 (1): 125-149.

Monday, 13 May 2013

These few words are in Lolspeak, the language created by
users of the website www.cheezland.org
(formerly www.icanhas cheezburger.com). The language dates from 2005, when users
of the website 4chan began to post lolcats every Saturday, renaming the day
as Caturday. Lolcats are pictures of cats with captions written in playful, idiosyncratic
English, now known as Lolspeak or Kitty pidgin. The cheezland website is now part
of the Cheezburger Network, thought to have a fan base of at least 24 million
people. There is now even a Lolcat Bible.

Why do so many people find this way of communicating attractive?
The users, who call themselves cheezpeeps,
claim that it is simply ‘silly fun’. Ilaria Fiorentini,
though, suggests that it is more than this: through Lolspeak, she says, people
playfully manipulate their language to construct an online fantasy group
community and an identity that is simultaneously both of a cat and themselves.

Fiorentini analysed 1067 comments (17, 195 words) on the icanhazcheezburger website. She argues
that although there are Lolspeak glossaries to help people use and understand
Lolspeak, many of the features depend on the creativity of its users.Interestingly, the elaborate language that cheezpeeps are constructing is evolving
through processes that are typical of ‘normal’ language change.

One such process involves regularizing English verb forms.
Whereas standard English has a present tense –s suffix with third person subjects only, Lolspeak – like many
English dialects – has the –s suffix
with all subjects of the verb (e.g. we awl
needs sumfing tu gib us teh comfort, ‘we all need something to give us
comfort’). In Lolspeak the regularization process is generalised still further,
so that the suffix also occurs with past tenses (ai jus hadz a baff, ‘I just had a bath’) modal verbs (yu cants be a nan teak, ‘you can’t be an
antique’) and infinitives (awl ob dose,
and mebbe sum ivys oar fernz tu puts aroun it, ‘all of those and maybe some
ivies or ferns to put around it’.

Cheezpeeps also
make irregular past tense verb forms more regular: examples are kommed in wi kommed home, ‘we came home’, and seed in I nebber seed a
kitteh do wat dey otter, ‘I never saw a kitten do what they ought to’. Double
marked past tenses also occur in the posts that Fiorentini analysed, like wented in hubcat and ai wented tu the grossree storetoday, ‘my husband and I went to the grocery store today’. As she points
out, regularisation of this kind is a very frequent phenomenon, typically
occurring when children acquire a first language and when we learn a second
language.

‘Lexicalisation’ is another typical process of language
change, where a phrase becomes used as a fixed word: a well-known example is
the word goodbye, from the phrase God be with you. In Lolspeak, the phrase
I think so has been lexicalised in
this way into an adverbmeaning ‘I
think’ or ‘in my opinion’ (aifinkso mebbe
it fell behynde the shelfs, ‘I think maybe it fell behind the shelves’).

Examples such as dey
lublublubs u foarebber, ‘they love you forever’ or too oar free daze ov sleepsleepsleep, ‘two or three days of sleep’
illustrate intensifying repetition; again, this is a well known process of
language evolution, in this case a feature that is characteristic of pidgin
languages.

Typical suffixes in Lolspeak are –mus for –ful or –ous (as in byootimus, above, or dangermus).
Many suffixes extend the basic form: some examples are –ity, -full and –ify in obviousity, windowfull
and insultify (e.g. she dint wanna insultify himz, ‘she
didn’t want to insult him’. These forms, together with the deliberate
misspelling seen in all the examples here, are typical of internet varieties
more generally.There are new words,
too, like nawt sekkund, ‘first’ (kitteh needz tu reed the bukk nawt sekkund
so hur can splain it to U layter, ‘kitten needs to read the book first so
she can explain it to you later’).

What kind of people belong to the cheezpeeps community? We cannot be sure, since what users say about
their identity is not necessarily truthful; nevertheless, it seems likely from their
comments and the user profiles that most are women in their forties or older.
They are also native or very fluent speakers of English (70% claimed to be from
the USA, 10% from Australia, 7% from the UK and about 5% from Canada (with the
rest from Europe, Saudi Arabia and Mexico). This is important: cheezpeeps may be enjoying themselves by
playing with their language, but at the same time they are trying to impress
their audience by demonstrating their high levels of linguistic skill. As
Fiorentini points out, being able to play with language in this way, pushing it
as far as possible whilst still being comprehensible, needs a high level of
understanding of language.

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